DP3M, SPP & Skin

I've been experimenting with SPP's negative fill and sharpening features for skin as has been recommended here.

Negative Fill feels to me very much like spherical aberration, a sort of "glamour glow" look, which is pleasing and not unlike some of the skin smoothing plugins I see for photoshop, though I haven't pushed negative fill very far.

Using it I get a subtle "well, the hairs are sharp, why is the skin slightly fuzzy/out of focus" sense - again sort of like spherical aberration. I can't tell if I like it or not. I may just stick to my usual skin smoothing techniques in photoshop.

It also added a subtle, but distinctive green/yellow tint to the image and decreased saturation. If you plan on using it, I recommend going into photoshop & adding it as a layer above the original image & change the blend mode to Luminosity. If you change it to Color or Saturation you can witness the color shift quite easily. Perhaps this can be corrected in SPP with Saturation & the color wheel.

It also seems to have the effect of mucking with global contrast (I believe this is the intended purpose of this feature). Highlights get brighter, midtones get darker, again sort of as if a veil was added over the image (this time affecting contrast, not sharpness).

The Smoother Portraits method, often recommended here just seem to cause the photo to go out of focus a bit (as does the negative fill to some extent).

Simply taking the sharpness down to -1 seemed to have very little effect, except to make the hairs go a bit fuzzy, so I haven't included that experiment (nor did I save the Smoother Portraits method).